BUS203: Principles of Marketing

Creating a multicultural marketing strategy

Multicultural marketing focuses on customizing messaging and marketing channels for each target group, as opposed to simply translating a general message into different languages, or including token representation of different ethnic groups in imagery.

A successful multicultural marketing strategy should be: multi-faceted, realistic and implemented consistently over time. In addition, there are 4 rules to make a cross-cultural marketing strategy: make your marketing bilingual – in world market in general and some large market in specific, most of the consumers are speaking more than one language, make sure digital marketing tactics match values and behavior, use entertainment and music as marketing tools, and develop cohesive content and programming.

There are 5 orders for a description of marketing strategy: detail specific activities that are intended to be undertaken, identify the target audience for each activity, specific how to measure success, be flexible enough for allowing adjustments, and finally, stipulate who is responsible for each activity.

There are several steps to create a multicultural marketing strategy. The first step is to identify objectives and markets, and the target customer and their characteristics. Secondly, the strategy should identify potential consumer touch points like a comfort zone, language or tradition, culture, etc. The next step is to identify the media that makes sense for the marketing goals. Fourthly, the marketer must evaluate the approach and learn from others' mistakes. Finally, the strategy must connect to the culture by understanding and respecting customers' culture and tradition, building trust and connection with them in evocative ways, then making the company' brand multicultural friendly.

Refreshing a multicultural marketing strategy

The fastest increasing population segment is multicultural audiences with expanding cultural beliefs that lead to the need of refreshing multicultural marketing strategy from companies to target products and services on this new growing population. In 2013, Forbes presented 5 tips to refresh a cross-cultural marketing strategy, which are: socialize and mobilize – as the multicultural audiences is leading in social media usage and mobile technology, the marketer also must be socialized and mobilized; secondly, thinking multiculturally mean being multicultural is one of the biggest mistakes, actually, marketers do not have to be in a specific ethnicity to think as the above-mentioned community. The next tip is prioritizing the multicultural strategy which means the cross-cultural mind must be incorporated into the core strategy and the multicultural customer should be target in overall brand strategy. In addition, understanding all meanings of "multicultural" is considered as the fourth tip as marketers must reach all the potential customers. The final tip is trying new media platform and marketing vehicles or in other words, marketers have to try new media platforms and tools of marketing as the consumers have already done.